E-business, E-commerce and other network service providers are concerned how their users perceive their services. Such service providers operating server systems with content servers providing particularly Hyper Text Transfer Protocol based applications over a network to distributed remote users desire to measure and manage their quality of service experience.
Among the quality indicators of interest to providers is data transfer throughput, providing a rate of transfer of data between a server and a remote user site. Other factors include success or failure of a transfer and whether a transfer was terminated by a user.
A variety of approaches to measuring performance of data transfers such as throughput within such data access systems is known. U.S. Pat. No. 5,913,041 issued Jun. 15, 1999 to Hewlett-Packard Company discloses a passive server side approach. Disclosed is a method and system for monitoring throughput of a data access system whereby each transfer of data from a content server to a user is logged at the content server and accessed to enable evaluation of the performance of the data transfers. However, each content server required to be monitored must be configured to implement the invention. Such a system cannot collect data from other access systems such as may be connected to the Internet at large to provide baseline data with which to form comparisons with the data for a specific data access system monitored.
Other systems provide a more active approach, emulating typical user access to measure throughput, etc. to content servers. One such tool is described in NetScore Intelligent Agent Tracks Users Response Time to Intranet/Internet Server, File Servers, IP Hosts and SNA Mainframes, dated 28 May, 1996, Anacapa Software. Such systems transmit performance data to a remote server for collection and analysis. However, simulated traffic approaches do not provide reliable real-world performance measures as real customers do not generate the traffic.
What is needed is a method and system for measuring real-world user-generated data transfers and user access of content servers, such as a World Wide Web server, that is transparent to user with minimal local resource use.